I’m in the middle of playing right through Doom 2 for the first time since around 1995.
Last time I had a Pentium 120MHz, 16MB of ram, a 2MB Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM, a Sound Blaster AWE 32 sound card, a 1GB HDD, and a NEC XE 15" monitor.
That was the first time I really had my own computer, and the first time I got to choose all the part that went into a computer. Lol, I still remember installing windows 95 from a stack of floppy disks, because the co-op bookshop didn’t have any CD versions.
This time around I’m playing on an 8 core Ryzen 7 5800x CPU, 64GB of ram, 16GB AMD RX 6800 GPU, 2TB SSD, an a 24" Dell U2412M monitor.
Lol, and with all that power, I’m now playing Doom 2, but slightly more 3D and with better lighting.
This is not like some earlier raytraced doom attempts. It really takes advantage of the new lighting, while keeping gameplay exactly the same. You can swipe between the raytraced renderer and the original while you’re playing.
How quickly things have advanced. When I was born, ordinary people didn’t have computers at home. The first “Personal Computers” with a handful of kilobytes of RAM had only just become a thing. It’s amazing looking back. Our generation has witnessed the beginning and rise of the age of computers and the internet. Historians in the future will mark this dividing line, before and after the rise of computers, and the age of the internet.
Lol, I had to use FSR dynamic upscaling to maintain 60FPS VSYNC.
So I’m back to the point where my computer needs an upgrade to run Doom 2 at full speed!
Hilarious. I thought I was finally finished with upgrading to run Doom better when I got the pentium system.
I think nvidia are the current raytracing champs. There’s a new global illumination thing in Unreal Engine 5 that looks exactly the same as ray traced scenes but uses a bunch of magic stuff to make it happen and is a lot easier on ordinary gfx cards.
Nvidia are definitely the champs there, but even they need upscaling and frame generation to get acceptable performace with all the advertised features enabled.
Raytracing is just hard, and while computing power has come a long way, “tricks” are still necessary to use it effectively.
Nvida have had their issues too. Because they’re artificially limiting VRAM to prevent people using their gaming cards for AI stuff, they’ve released a bunch of cards that are great at raytracing on paper, but end up failing hard because they run out of VRAM with modern games. Doesn’t always show in the average frame rate figures, but stuttering and big frame time spikes often create a situation where 16GB cards from AMD are more usable.
Of course, no problem if you can afford the 16GB and up cards from NVIDIA, but because of the AI thing, they really charge a premium for that extra RAM.
I’ve had the RX 6800 for a while now, and this is actually the first time I’ve used raytracing.
It’s pretty neat how much lighting alone can affect the look of a scene. I’m not really up on exactly how raytracing works, but I think the gist of it is color calculations per pixel (or more than a pixel) according to directivity of various light sources (and reflections) in the scene. I guess that is a shit ton of calculations.
